Tales of Becoming: Borders and Posthuman Anxieties in Daisy Johnson’s "Starver" (2016)

Abstract

This article aims at examining Daisy Johnson’s collection of short stories Fen (2014) and, most particularly, its opening piece “Starver”, through the lens of posthuman feminism by arguing that Johnson’s collection poses forward a relational ontology which refuses to consider human subjectivity as exclusively restricted to the confines of human bodies by blurring traditional boundaries as constitutive of oppositions such as nature/culture, human/non-human, male/female which have traditionally articulated anthropocentric worldviews. Johnson’s focus on the English Fenlands as a borderline, liminal topology mirrors contemporary preoccupations with the porosity and instability of allegedly firm borders and, by extension, of identity. Johnson’s collection ultimately interrogates the relationship between individuals and their environment, radically distressed by human intervention and capitalist consumerism, thus heading to the “sixth extinction” of the Anthropocene.